It was a quest that began over three decades ago when the author began teaching at the Owen Sound Collegiate and Vocational Institute (OSCVI) in 1984. The school had a long, storied history dating back to 1856 when it first opened its doors to students from Owen Sound and the surrounding area. As a teacher of a survey course in Canadian history…

The current study investigates the impact of using an Instructional Model of Historical Empathy to teach the Holocaust on students' ability to contextualize historical events, recognize perspectives, and affectively connect to victims of the Holocaust. A three-day instructional unit was designed that incorporates primary sources from a variety of…

Inspired by the work of the social and cultural historian Tim Cole, Stuart Farley decided to look again at the way he teaches the Holocaust. He wanted to focus on the geographical concept of place as a way of enabling his Year 9 students to build far more diverse narratives, which took full account of the chronological diversity of people's…

A study of the Holocaust is a challenging task. Schools often dedicate little time to the study of the subject, and teachers are often largely unprepared in regard to their content mastery of the subject, as well as the appropriate pedagogical tools to help guide students through the study of intellectually and emotionally difficult material.…

Examining history from the perspective of investigators who wrestle with involved scenarios for which no simple answers exist, or from which no obvious conclusions can be drawn, allows students to understand the historiographic process and the complex nature of historical events, while gaining valuable practice in applying analytical and critical…

Artists today draw on a range of sources--newspapers, magazines, photographs, film, audio, and of course the Internet--to create artworks that serve as visual "texts" of a specific place and moment in time. Using artworks as sources and understanding how to decode them in the service of "drilling down" into difficult topics can create powerful…

Over the past two decades, interest in Holocaust education has grown substantially as individual states, starting in the 1980s, began to mandate and/or recommend Holocaust studies as part of the social studies curriculum. As a result, these mandates and/or interest in the Holocaust have spawned any number of curriculum products, some of which seek…

If history teachers' aim is to teach students how to think, why not ask: What forms of thought do historians use, and what specific techniques will inculcate these forms? In this article, the author proposes a fundamental shift, from courses with a focus on the mastery of data to courses with a priority on learning the historian's craft. The…